August 22, 2012
www.thestar.com.my
Modern Lessons upon Disappointed Idealists
by Karim Raslan (08-21-12)
A recent book by an Asian observer of Asian societies breathes brand new hold up in to some old(er) ideas.
I SPENT many of the 1990s either essay or reading about the Asian Values debate. It's hard to suppose now, yet in the years heading up to the 1997 monetary crisis, books by Pakistan's Muhammad Iqbal as well as Iran's Ali Shariati, not to mention the really own Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad as well as Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim, were tip of my reading list.
So, it was with the degree of dismay which you first picked up Pankaj Mishra's latest book: From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West as well as the Remaking of Asia. Fearing the repeat of those tiresome, discredited arguments, you turned the pages warily.
However, Pankaj's spritely comment of turn-of-the-century Asian intellectual hold up approaches the subject from an altogether more exciting vantage point. For the start, he starts with an comment of the Battle of Tsushima in May 1905 of the Russo-Japanese War.
Over the century ago, the outcome seemed the foregone conclusion. How could the Japanese presumably strike the perfect competence of Imperial Russia? Everything seemed to favour the Europeans as they systematically subjugated the Asiatic world.
However, as well as roughly unbelievably, Admiral Togo's quick was to arise victorious. In the singl! e fell s woop, Korea, Manchuria as well as many of the western Pacific were to spin an prolongation of Japanese energy setting in motion the series of events culminating with the nuclear attacks upon Hiroshima as well as Nagasaki 40 years later.
Nonetheless, Japan's victory was also to have an enduring impact intellectually opposite Middle East galvanising the generation. Men such as the Iranian-born pan-Islamist Jamal Al-Din Al-Afghani, Liang Qichao of China as well as the Indian Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore, the arch protagonists of Pankaj's book, had witnessed their civilisations endure the succession of degrading defeats.
For them as well as others Sun Yat Sen, Ataturk (then known as Mustapha Kemal) as well as Nehru Tsushima brought hope. It allowed them to suppose what their peoples were capable of if they embarked (like the Japanese) upon the journey of domestic as well as economic transformation.
Interestingly, in an epoch prolonged prior to the advent of mass democracy, all 3 group recognised which enlightened (and maybe despotic) care was critical in order to achieve governmental change volatile sufficient to repel the Europeans.
Uttar Pradesh-born as well as Allahabad-trained Pankaj Mishra has constructed the 
remarkable book something which you were striving for back in the 90's yet never produced.
From the Ruins of Empire is radically an Eastern canon of domestic suspicion linking Indian, Chinese as well as Arab/Muslim figures as well as ideas. Pankaj (right) reveals how their responses to the ignominy of colonialism were to shape their future nation-states.
This successor of V.S. Naipaul's layer is in fact really identical to his 3 selected subjects. Growing up upon the diet of the American censor Edmund Wilson, Pankaj is himsel! f the or ganisation believer in the energy of ideas as well as it's this joining to intellectualism (unlike Dr Mahathir as well as Anwar Ibrahim who trusted in tender power) which propels his narrative.
Moreover, as the world-class person arriving as well as essayist, Pankaj's papers have the sure ? la mode resonance. He traces the skein of ideas, similar to the expansion of Wahhabism as well as the intermingling with privately Egyptian experiences of Hassan al-Banna as well as Sayyid Qutb the process which was to lead to the quick globalisation of Wahhabi thought.
At the same time, Pankaj's trio were conscious which the blind adoption of Western modes would sack Middle East of the informative heritage as well as spin the Occident's vices in to the own.
Each of the group sought the "middle-path", job upon their societies to supply themselves with complicated scholarship as well as thinking yet to reject the grosser aspects of Western modernity with larger informative confidence.
Sadly, all 3 group were to be grievously disappointed. Whilst they sought to find an acceptable concede between East as well as West, they were not to live to see any of their ideas come to fruition, besides which their intransigence was to come at great personal cost.
Al-Afghani, arguably the father of domestic Islam, lived the hold up of constant re-invention. Dying in obscurity, this latter-day "Scarlet Pimpernel" was to rue his focus upon normal Muslim elites, many of whom abandoned his call for the pan-Islamic revival.
Liang, whose reformist activities made him the longed for man in Qing dynasty China, wound up the Confucian regressive arguing after the disillusioning outing to America which "the Chinese people must for right away accept authoritarian rule; they cannot suffer freedom."
Even Tagore's calls for Middle East to maintain the cultures was violently rejected by revolutionary-minded thinkers (! includin g the young Mao Zedong) during his harangue tours of China, the preface to the destructive Cultural Revolution.
Their failures have been warnings for Asian leaders today. As Pankaj argues in his glorious Epilogue, China as well as India have right away unthinkingly bought in to the gospels of globalised capitalism which "looks set to create reservoirs of nihilistic rage as well as beating among hundreds of millions of have-nots."
Pankaj's book is hence not some uncomplicated paean to "Asian values." He warns which you Asians should not swank over the West's decline as well as the prosperity.
Rather, the failure of the chosen to, in Pankaj's words, shape metal the "convincingly universalist response to Western ideas of politics as well as economy, even yet the latter seem increasingly febrile as well as dangerously unsuited in large tools of the world" condemns us to repeat the mistakes of the West.
This is the prophetic book which cannot be abandoned by Middle East relocating forward. How you instruct Pankaj had written it all those years ago. It would have saved me the lot of effort.
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